EXOD817 When we envision a farm, our minds fill with pictures from childhood songs of animals blissfully grazing in pastures green. Tragically, the reality of today's farms is a different scene entirely: Egg-laying hens are raised in overcrowded cages and debeaked with hot searing knives. Male chicks are “useless,” and so they are discarded at birth by being thrown into garbage bags to suffocate or into shredding machines to be turned into food for the other chickens. Calves that are raised for veal are taken from their mothers a day or two after birth and placed in tiny dark cages with their heads chained in place. Beef cattle are overfed, castrated, dehorned, and branded without anesthetics and finally shipped in overcrowded trucks to be slaughtered. And this is just scratching the surface of the modern industrial reality of mass-produced animal products that lurks behind the plastic-wrapped morsels we find in the supermarket. Today's farms, often termed “factory farms” for their production-line approach to animal rearing, offer a sharp contrast to the Jewish tradition’s teaching of tzaar baalei chayim, the commandment of preventing suffering to animals. In the Talmud, the Sages conclude that tzaar baalei chayim is a Toraitic obligation. Based on the interpretation of the biblical command to unload a pack animal (this verse), the Rabbis conclude, “We have learned that tzaar baalei chayim [the prevention of suffering to animals] is a biblical obligation” (Babylonian Talmud, Bava M’tzia 32a-b). This majority opinion is later supported in the halachic commentaries and codes. From this point, the Rabbis go on to instruct that tzaar baalei chayim is so important that we are permitted to break other mitzvot in order to prevent any suffering to animals, including the laws of Shabbat and Yom Tov (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 128b). That is, the very laws that the Rabbis protected with fences upon fences, must, in certain circumstances, be broken in order to spare an animal from pain. It is from the core of the halachic body of literature concerning the prevention of suffering of animals that the use of the term tzaar baalei chayim has been expanded in recent years to express the more general value placed upon the compassionate treatment of animals scattered throughout our tradition. The Torah and the Rabbinic literature overflow with passages that guide us to be compassionate in our treatment of animals. (By Rayna Ellen Gevurtz, "Kindness to Animals: Tzaar Baalei Chayim")